As 2025 comes to an end, we note the continued essential role of community engagement against the backdrop of extraordinary upheaval in the past months: severe funding cuts across global health and within WHO itself have disrupted essential TB services, destabilized community-led organizations, and stretched health workers to a breaking point. Families and individuals affected by TB are bearing the brunt of disruptions, and decades of hard-won progress in engaging communities in TB care and prevention efforts hang in the balance. Despite these challenges, in 2025, the WHO Civil Society Task Force on TB (CSTF-TB) has continued to push for the meaningful engagement of community and civil society across all levels of the TB response. We have expanded our roles in contributing to WHO TB policies and guidelines, strengthened the annual evaluation of country progress using WHO indicators, contributed to evidence supporting an investment case for community engagement, as well as advancing tools that help countries deliver more equitable, people-centered TB responses. Our members have been involved in critical WHO Guideline Development Groups, political and technical dialogues, and the global report, ensuring that affected communities were not only heard but meaningfully shaping decisions. We also advocated for continuing to prioritize and fund meaningful community engagement, austerity measures notwithstanding.
In a time of crisis and uncertainty, our collective work has shown that partnership between policymakers and affected communities is not only possible, but critical and catalytic. The CSTF-TB continues to set the standard for meaningful engagement across WHO, advancing the vision of the End TB Strategy and the commitments of the UN High-Level Meeting on TB.
As we enter 2026, our resolve is stronger than ever. With continued WHO support for a dedicated and empowered CSTF-TB for the next two-year term, we will work to sustain and increase momentum and ensure the world does not step back from its promise to end TB. We will continue to embody and champion community voices and leadership in decisions on funding, strategic planning, evidence generation, patient safety, programme implementation, monitoring, and accountability because the TB response is most effective when it is community-driven and accountable to affected communities.
Communities are committed to ending TB. And, as we always have, we will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with WHO.
We extend our warmest wishes for the end of the year, and wish you and your family safety, strength, peace, and renewed purpose in the year ahead.
In solidarity,
Ms Ashna Ashesh
Ms Handaa Enkh-Amgalan
Dr Akramul Islam
Ms Victoria James
Ms Yuliia Kalancha
Dr Karina Kielmann
Dr Ghulam Qader Qader
Ms Ida Savadogo Yugbare
Dr Yassen Tcholakov
Dr Helene-Mari Van Der Westhuizen
Mr Luan Vo
Mr Timothy Wafula
